2006-01-09 Software

I’m quite happy with my new mail setup: Fetchmail gets my mail and pipes it to Procmail (no local MDA). A procmail recipe pipes it through SpamProbe, and so it finally ends up in the folders RMAIL, SPAM (and LISTS for list administration). I read mail using Rmail in Emacs, and use rmail-spamprobe.el to correct mistakes SpamProbe is making. At the moment, there are some false positives (a few spam classified as non-spam every day), but I have high hopes. (More technical details at 2006-01-04 Software.)

I have RmailMime working, I wrote RmailConversationSummary, I use Gnus to connect to Gmane and read emacs-devel, don’t get a lot of email because I’m on no mailing lists anymore, no longer too involved in FreeSoftware activities... Mail life is back to good!

Gnus

Gmane

emacs-devel

FreeSoftware

Being able to tinker with your tools goes a long way in reintroducing “fun”. (See KathySierra’s Never Underestimate the Power of Fun.)

Never Underestimate the Power of Fun

#Software #Mail

Comments

(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)

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So have you found religion in RMAIL? Is it everything you want? How does it compare to other mailers?

Most RMAIL users I’ve heard of have only done their mail using RMAIL since 1982, and offer little to no comparisons of other (modern) mailers.

– AaronHawley 2006-01-09 15:58 UTC

AaronHawley

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I think the key here is *fun*. Gnus might have more features, but it is a behemoth to hack. It’s like comparing ERC and rcirc – one of them has more features, the other is more fun.

ERC

rcirc

What doesn’t work:

Decoding RFC 2047 headers (encoded-words, section 5) needed code in my .emacs, therefore I believe that in its default state, Rmail is unusable except for ASCII-only languages such as English, Hawaiian, Indonesian, etc.
MIME is not integrated (and using rmime.el will display HTLM documents using an external program via metamail instead of inlining the text).
The rmail-mbox-branch is 15 months old, now. I think we should move from BABYL to mbox format as soon as possible.
It comes without Spam-filtering, so you have to set up a spam-filter yourself.

So why use Rmail instead of Gnus or ThunderBird?

Gnus

ThunderBird

Using labels (tags). I hope that this will help me find messages accross subjects.
Get rid of a setup that encourages the use of folders, because these add errors to search (misfiled mails) and pose problems for classification (mails belonging to multiple categories which you can only handle by copying, but that also separates meta-data such as read, answered, or deleted flags).
Encourage a system where the file size of the archive is the only limit. I’ve had good experience with a system of one folder per year.
A system that is easy enough to hack so that I can experiment with new interfaces (eg. RmailConversationSummary), which was too hard to contemplate in either Gnus or Thunderbird.
- Alex Schroeder 2006-01-09 16:08 UTC
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Alex Schroeder

Ich bin es schon wieder! Ich benutze rmail weil es einfach und integriert ist. Ich sehe viele Dinge die man besser oder einfacher machen koennte:

Unterstuezung fuer nicht ASCII Zeichen - Wie genannt, die benutzung des mbox formates - Html unterstuezung

Naja, diese Dinge waeren alle nett, aber dafuer gibt es workarounds. Was mich wirklich stoert ist das fehlen von pgp. Ich weiss das es dafuer Module gibt, aber funktioniert haben sie bei mir nie (liegt wahrscheinlich an mir). Es ist psychologisch sehr demotivierend eine Mail von einer Freundin zu bekommen und feststellen zu muessen das sie nur aus Rauschen besteht und man keine moeglichkeit mehr hat sie zu decodieren (auch rmail-output hat nicht mehr geklappt).

– Olaf 2006-01-20 01:31 UTC